The Unofficial Squaresoft MUD is a free online game based on the worlds and combat systems of your favorite Squaresoft games. UOSSMUD includes job trees from FFT and FF5, advanced classes from multiple other Square games, and worlds based extremely accurately upon Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and Final Fantasies 5, 6, and 7. Travel through the original worlds and experience events that mirror those of the original games in an online, multiplayer format.

If a large, highly customized MUD, now over 10 years old and still being expanded, with a job system and worlds based on some of the most popular console RPGs seems interesting to you, feel free to log on and check it out. Visit uossmud.sandwich.net for information about logging on.

A user named Gabsond on Reddit just very generously released a bunch of pixel art tilesets for free use by anyone, commercial or non-commercial. Here's his thread. I thought I'd link them here! You can use these assets for any purpose you want without any limitations.

Help me come up with ideas for a thief type character in a game where fights can only be fought once each, and some of them can be avoided! I don't want to overly punish players for not using the thief, or for avoiding battles, and I don't want to make them feel like they have to steal from every enemy in every battle. It's okay I guess if they are SLIGHTLY disadvantaged in the long run by avoiding fights, which is already the case because they're missing out on EXP and gold, but if possible I'd like to avoid making that worse.

Complicating this problem, I've limited the player's inventory so they can hold a maximum of three consumable items at a time. So stealing potions would be awkward, as it would often be impossible to carry any more. Maybe it would still be okay? Looking for other ideas, even if I do that one.

With the blue mage in this game, I encountered a similar issue, and solved the problem by making it so if you beat a dungeon that has blue magic without ever letting any enemy use the blue magic spell, you learn it automatically and get a bonus reward for being badass.

Man, towns in RPGs suck. People don't know how to make them. It's a problem I have too, one I mostly avoid by just not making towns. Let's brainstorm better methods.

Here is a very common set of problems I've encountered with trying to make traditional towns:
- There's a set of buildings you absolutely need in every town. An inn, an item shop, 2-3 equipment shops, and possibly other things depending on your game. So you start by plopping these down.
- You probably have one important building the player has to visit for plot reasons, so you add that too. In many cases this one building ends up being the only unique feature of the town, other than the climate.
- You also, in order to make it seem more like a town instead of a minimall, need some other stuff that doesn't really add any gameplay, it's just there to look at. Most people do this just by adding random houses.
- By the time you're done that basic stuff, your town is as big as most RPG towns, and also you're exhausted, so you just toss in some poorly placed bushes and call it a day.

THIS RESULTS IN SOME SERIOUSLY BORING-ASS TOWNS

I have a method I personally use of making towns more interesting. I've been made fun of for this method, mostly by Craze, as he likes to simplify it to "sticking a cannon on it." It ain't inaccurate.

The method revolves around coming up with a setting or landmark that's unique and interesting. A key feature for the town. Some examples include: a monastery, a huge aqueduct, a battalion of catapults aimed at an encroaching orcish war party, a giant portal to another dimension, a dragon roost at the top of a cliff, a submarine port, the crumbling outer wall of a demolished fortress, a haunted circus, etc. Junon in FF7 had a giant cannon sticking out of the side of it for its key feature, and I think that's just fuckin' brilliant, which is where the name comes from. This key feature will be more than just the most interesting thing in your town - it will be its theme. Its presence will pervade the entire town. It is the reason the town matters.

This key feature will usually be part of the plot - it's either the reason the party is visiting the town, or the epicenter of the crisis that occurs after they arrive. But if you need a town for gameplay reasons, and nothing in your plot suggests a key feature for this town, then the next best thing is to pick something decorative that fits your game's atmosphere. Maybe it'll inspire a sidequest or something at least.

After coming up with the big thing, I usually put the most important shops and other building along the path from the town entrance to this key feature. Sometimes I do it the other way around if the landmark is small and easy to miss and I want to make sure the player passes by it repeatedly. And then most of the important events and key NPCs will be very close to the key feature, if not inside it.

I also try to make at least half of my towns non-traditional towns. Sometimes they're just one building, with some NPCs selling stuff. Other times I might make the shops and other things be outdoors, or in caves, or in makeshift shelters, or in the engineering bay of the half-build steamship, or somewhere else other than a traditional building. The key feature of the town hopefully lends your town a certain theme with regards to this sort of thing. Expand the key feature, spreading its tendrils through everything you place.

The existance of something cool in the town, something that actually matters, will help sell the idea that the town is there for more than just the player's shopping convenience. It can seem awkward when a "town" has four houses in it, but it's less awkward when the NPCs are in the town for a reason other than just living there. If they're in the town to make a pilgrimage to a 2500 meter tall crystal spire, or because the entire "town" is just a dock where their sandship is parked, then you wouldn't really expect thousands of residences.

Anyway!

I know other people have very different methodologies for making towns, and some of you guys end up making really, really good towns with those methods. I'm curious how you do it. And if you think my giant cannon method is helpful or stupid.

Hey, I did a thread about this topic back in 2012. A lot of this opening post is gonna be just copied and pasted from that thread. But it's been a long time, the site has different people than it did five years ago, and a lot of us have grown and think differently about games than we used to. I've decided that it'd be cool for the people who are on the site now to participate in more game design threads, so yo, let's talk about video games. Specifically, about dying in them.

Dying in a video game sucks.

Or does it? It depends on the game; on how many tries it takes you; on whether you know what to do differently next time; on whether the death was caused by something completely in your control or not; on what you lose when you die.

It's that last factor that I want to talk about. In this topic we're talking about what to do to the player when he or she dies.

Game over, you say. Duh.

First of all, that's only one of a large number of options. And second of all, there are several different factors that can make a game over more or less punishing. What I really want to delve into is why are punishments for failure necessary, why are they problematic, and how can you maximize the player's feeling of accomplishment while minimizing frustration?

Let's take a look at various punishment options.

Game over with periodic save pointsLike I said, there are different factors that can affect a game over - the biggest one is how saving is handled. With saving allowed only at save points, which appear periodically through the game, the designer can designate a longer stretch of the game as a "single non-stop challenge" that you can't restart from the middle of. Very few games allow you to save in the middle of a battle and restart from that point, right? Because that would be super cheap, it heavily encourages abuse of enemy AI and stuff. In traditional RPGs where most normal battles are not really very dangerous, but dungeons are essentially wars of attrition where your goal is to get through all the battles without using up your resources, you can make the same argument for a dungeon that you do for a battle. So the player has to restart the challenge - which is the whole dungeon.

The big downside here is that the player can get sent back 30-45 minutes, which can be extremely discouraging. Losing the better part of an hour to a game over feels like bullshit in cases where the player only made one mistake near the end, but has to redo all of it. If the player didn't just make one mistake, but actually is having trouble with managing their pacing and with the challenge as a whole, they're likely to lose several times before finishing, which means that they'll be stuck in the same dungeon for hours and hours.

I've seen this used as a way of disguising the wild difficulty swings in games that have bad balance, since players can go through a very easy dungeon without realizing how easy it was until after they beat it. Don't do that. Just fix your damn difficulty.

Game over with save-anywhereBasically, here, we swap the "game over sends you back too far" problem for the "you can start from the middle of a challenge and cheese it by brute force" problem. A lot of people prefer this to the above. In games where you are fully or mostly restored after each battle, I can't come up with a reason not to allow save-anywhere. The overwhelming majority of modern commerical games use this method in combination with frequent automatic quicksaves, so that the player doesn't have to remember to manually save after every battle. Adding a Retry command to the game over screen is usually a no-brainer if you're using this method, especially in a game where battles take place on a separate screen from dungeon exploration.

Game over with automatic saving at checkpointsThis is kind of a middle ground between the above two. At first glance it doesn't seem that different from periodic save points aside from the fact that it's automatic and thus you don't have to remember to save. But in practice, this system is often used when you only have a small number of enemies between checkpoints. It changes the individual challenges from being entire dungeons full of battles to being rooms or corridors full of battles.

Respawn at nearby point without losing XPFF6 does this. So does Earthbound. So do a lot of MMORPGs. Essentially here, you get sent back to the last save point or to the nearest church/graveyard or some other sort of nearby respawn point, and have to redo the battles between that point and where you died, but you get to keep any XP you got. So it's a little easier the second time. And if you die again, you'll have even more XP, so it'll be a little easier again the third time. And so forth. I find this to be extremely nice, myself, because it helps out players who are having trouble without making the game any easier for good players, and more importantly because it makes the time you spent not feel like a waste. Sometimes there's also a small penalty - usually gold, as payment for hospital fees or for reincarnation services or for armor repairs, but it's typically a trivial amount.

Respawn with heavy penaltyI've seen this used mostly in online games, such as FF11, but also in single-player games where the world "persists" through your death. Dragon Quest takes away half your money and sends you back to the starting town when you die; many later games do the same thing but send you back to the most recent town you saved at instead. It's not the worst thing, but don't combine it with save-anywhere, or people will just reload to avoid the penalty.

Delete saved game on deathThis is as brutal as it gets. The idea here is that the only type of save that a player gets is a quicksave; you can save at any time, but the save is deleted upon loading your game. And if you die, you start the game over. As RPGs go, this is most popular in short games (Gauntlet, Desktop Dungeon) and in roguelikes such as Nethack. I guess the idea here is the whole "can't restart from the middle of a challenge" mentality taken to its logical extreme: the entire game is effectively a single nonstop challenge. To me the cost outweighs the benefit here so heavily that this option isn't even on the table. If you can justify the use of this in games longer than an hour, I'd love to hear your point of view.

Dead characters are permanently lostFire Emblem is the classic series that's famous for permadeath, but if your entire party dies then it still gives you a game over. That's not the case in X-Com and Darkest Dungeon - when your party dies, the game auto-saves and sends you back to your base. When your characters die you're forced to continue the game with other characters, which often requires an extra hour or two of levelling the new characters up to the strength your old ones were at. In many ways this is only very slightly less punishing than deleting the player's save when they die. I'm personally not a fan, but it can sort of work if you have a game where the characters are very much expected to die a lot (as is true in both of those example games). One would expect a very low level cap in such games - the level cap in Darkest Dungeon is level 6 and in most X-Com games is even lower.

Limited number of lives/continuesThis is super rare in RPGs. Like, to the point that I've never seen it in my life. Ultimately you have all the same problems as the above "delete saved games on death" method, but the player is less likely to encounter them. Some games do play with spins on this, giving each character on your team a limited number of lives before they permanently leave the party (SaGa series), or giving the player a limited number of continues to retry the current battle and if you run out you have to reload from the beginning of the dungeon (Wild ARMs 3). If done right, maybe this can make "cheap" deaths feel less cheap - because they don't feel like a complete death, they feel more like... losing some of your HP.

What are your favorites? Why? What are the biggest problems do you have with the others? Almost all of these have both good and bad points, so I guess it's largely a matter of which good points you value more and which bad points you find more irritating.

RPG Maker, when you go into full screen, stretches the screen unevenly. (It also anti-aliases the pixel graphics, which is annoying but not AS bad). I've been looking on-and-off for, uh.... years? ...for a script that will solve this.

There are scripts that fix this for RPG Maker VX Ace, but they rely on methods that were added to the built-in Graphics module in VX Ace. I need something that fixes it in RPG Maker XP. Graphics.resize_screen doesn't frikkin' exist in RGSS1, and it's one of those hidden scripts that Enterbrain won't release the code for.

So far my research has gotten me as far as the Pokemon Essentials set of scripts that rebuilds the entire RMXP script base from scratch. Someone made an add-on for Pokemon Essentials to solve this problem. However it doesn't work without Pokemon Essentials, and I would rather not spend 200 hours learning how it works to try to extract the relevant parts of it just to get a working fullscreen button, unless I have to.

So my question is, does anyone know of a script for RPG Maker XP that makes fullscreen work on widescreen monitors without stretching the window unevenly?

Welcome to A Land of Espers, a Final Fantasy 3 fan-site by LockeZ. Enjoy the broken images, the defunct webrings, and the midi files that don't play. I'm pretty sure I just downloaded a bunch of stuff off of other people's fantsites and put them on mine.

Although this was snapshotted by the Internet Archive in 1999, I actually made it in 1995 at the latest, since I distinctly remember being contacted by Geocities when they changed their terms of service to require webmasters to be at least twelve years old.

Do you have a Geocities site that has been archived by the Wayback Machine? Please share with me your darkest secrets.

How many of you know what a randomizer mod is? It's a version of a video game - usually a mod or a romhack of an older game - where a bunch of the content is shuffled at random. For example, the Final Fantasy 1 Randomizer shuffles the contents of all the game's treasure chests, the spells that are available at each spell level, the inventory of every shop in the game, and the status effects used by enemies. The Legend of Zelda Randomizer creates random new dungeon layouts with random rooms and random enemies, shuffles item locations, and also shuffles the locations of dungeon entrances with shops, old men, and other random caves.

Different games choose different things to randomize, but the basic idea is the same - create replay value by creating a different experience every time, and create a fresh experience by making sure the player doesn't quite know what to do despite their familiarity with the game. In many cases this will get people who enjoyed the game to play it one or two more times, because it'll feel like playing the game for the first time again. In a few cases this can get certain types of players to play the game over and over.

There's usually a pretty low focus on being a "good" game every time. For example a lot of the time in the Legend of Zelda Randomizer you can find the Triforce piece in the first room of a dungeon, and the boss will only drop the compass, which does nothing but tell you the boss location. Players seem pretty forgiving of this sort of thing since they realize it's not how the game was meant to be played. So it's much less effort than making, say, a roguelike.

About three months ago I made a randomizer for one of my own games, the Unofficial Squaresoft MUD. I'm wondering how many other people have made, or considered making, randomizers for their own games. Why or why not? Is this something that indie games should try to do more? Is it something you'd be interested in as a player?

Also, from a technical standpoint, I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with doing this in RPG Maker, or any clever ideas of how to go about doing so.

1. Do not share any PMs from the moderator. Your private messages must be kept secret. You may describe what was in them, but directly quoting any portion of them will result in mod-kill.

2. The game is divided into day phases of (at least) 48 hours and night phases of 24 hours. Some day phases may be longer. There will be no talking on the main thread during night phase, except for the person who cast the hammer vote, who is allowed to write and post erotic fanfiction. Members sharing private chats may talk in their private chat at any time.

3. No talking to other players about the game outside of Mafia, and NO PMING! You can PM me, but that's it. Obviously, the no PM rule is on the honor system but if I find out, there will be consequences.

4. Each day, players discuss who is most likely to be mafia and vote for one person to be voted off of the game. Voting follows standard rules. Votes are to be presented in the thread, using the following format: #Lynch lockez. If you for any reason you change your mind, use the following tag: #Cancel A lynch is successful when more than half of the players vote for the same person, or when the day period ends. If there is a tie when the day ends, no lynch will occur.

5. Each night, scum will tell me who they want to kill, and other players will use their powers and items. Scum will have their own private chatroom to discuss who to kill.

6. You must post daily. If you're not talking, you're not playing the game. If you're not playing the game, then why are you here?

7. No editing posts. Only the moderator may edit his posts, and he can also edit you right into the grave if you break this rule too many times. However, double-posting is allowed in this topic.

8. No dead posting. If you're dead, you're dead.

ADDITIONAL RULES:

1. Any player making a HAMMER VOTE must write a minimum of one paragraph of erotic fanfiction about the person being lynched having some form of sexual relations with one or more fictional characters. A hammer vote is the final killing vote that causes a person to be lynched by majority vote. This fanfiction can be posted after the hammer vote, any time before the end of the night phase. The erotic fanfiction can be extremely bad. Quality is not enforced or expected. In fact, the stupider it is, the better.

2. You waive your rights to decency. By joining this game, you agree to allow someone in this thread to write a story about you getting raped to death by Scooby Doo. If you don't want that to happen, either don't join this game, or make sure you survive to the end.

To join the game, respond in the thread and say you're willing to join.

Once we get enough people, I will be sending out PMs to each player describing their role and their powers, and then we will get started.